Fractional Chief AI Officer.
An industrial private equity firm with about $1.7B under management and nine portfolio companies had no AI capability anywhere in the firm. As fractional Chief AI Officer, 3Pillars scored the opportunities, won an investment-committee AI charter, then built three production tools on Claude: a sourcing desk, a fundraising desk and diligence triage.
Company Profile
A mid-market industrial private equity firm: over $1.7B of committed capital, nine portfolio companies, 22 employees across deal, business development, fundraising and portfolio teams. A partner bought the engagement; the whole firm uses what it produced.
The Challenge
Deal teams reviewed diligence data rooms by hand: thousands of pages, read too late in the deal window, with dead deals hitting the bonus pool directly. The deal CRM was stale and mislabeled: roughly 750 proprietary targets sat unworked, many tagged wrong, so outreach stalled and follow-ups slipped. Fundraising staff tracked 200+ limited partners in spreadsheets with no reliable view of who to meet next. Partners disagreed on what AI was worth, and one was openly skeptical.
They had tried a partner’s own diligence prototype (useful, unshared, one-off), the CRM vendor’s reporting (could not answer plain-language questions) and an agency conversation priced at a $250,000 floor. Nothing was systematized: no roadmap, no governance, no production tools, no shared standard for judging AI opportunities. Competing firms were announcing AI programs and frontier labs were partnering with large sponsors; the partners wanted their own capability before it became a commodity.
The firm needed a defensible view of where AI pays, and then working systems.
What 3Pillars Did
Advisory: April to June 2026
Roughly 20 structured interviews across deal, business development, fundraising and portfolio teams. Each candidate opportunity was scored on a two-by-two, difficulty against competitive advantage, and packaged into an AI charter that the firm’s investment committee ratified. The two-by-two killed low-value projects before any spend.
Build: three production tools, in daily use since June 2026
Sourcing desk
Plain-language questions over the deal CRM (companies, deals, stages, 35,000+ interaction records). Groups the ~750 proprietary targets from live fields, re-anchors follow-up clocks on logged calls, and ranks the daily outreach list.
Fundraising desk
200+ limited-partner profiles with pipeline views, tear sheets and generated meeting-prep briefs, built from placement-agent CRM and Outlook history.
Diligence triage
Reads every file in a deal room and flags issues by category, including insurance-exclusion and indemnity review; a partner-built screening skill hardened through 3Pillars’ architecture work.
Reporting
Monthly business-development reports and intermediary one-pagers generated on demand from one verified data source, reconciled against CRM ground truth.
Each tool runs on Claude through a per-user, passkey-gated web app with server-side audit logging, plus a Claude skill and a self-hosted MCP server so the firm’s own Claude sessions query live data directly. 3Pillars provisioned access, wrote the accuracy test battery that runs the question-answering pipeline against ground-truth SQL before every release, trained daily users, managed build-vendor selection and pricing, and coached partners as they began building their own Claude skills. The contract expanded from the CAIO engagement to the build, and then to a portfolio company.
Results
The self-serve one-pager generator was validated against 29 top intermediaries, and signed-deal counts reconcile across all four annual charts. The firm’s most skeptical partner now uses the sourcing desk daily and builds his own Claude skills. Figures are compiled by 3Pillars from server logs, the release test battery and reconciliation audits, June to September 2026.
Functional Areas Touched
Highlighted nodes are where the tools changed daily work.